All posts tagged Vera Farmiga

As a former rehearsal adviser, filmmaker Christopher Neil had the advantage of knowing how to work closely with actors as he dove into making his debut feature film “Goats.”

“I’m a big believer in a really exploratory rehearsal process,” says Neil. “Even if it’s just for a few days, it helps the actors really come together.”

For “Goats,” which premieres at the Sundance Film Festival this week, that exploratory immersion included sending his lead actors Graham Phillips and David Duchovny — who respectively play a prep school-bound teenager and his marijuana-smoking goat herder-guardian — into the Tuscon desert with a professional goat herder. Read More »

Actress Vera Farmiga, known for her roles in big films like “Up in the Air,” for which she got a best-supporting actress Oscar nomination, has emerged as a vocal critic of Hollywood’s failure to create sufficiently complicated roles for women. In interviews, she’s grown accustomed to being asked whether the tide is turning. The answer, she says, is no.

Farmiga, 38, decided to direct and star in “Higher Ground,” an independent coming-of-age drama that will be released on Aug. 26 by Sony Pictures Classics, “because I was growing tired of the same boring response” to the question, she says. “You can sit around hemming and hawing and not doing anything about it, or you can try evening the playing field.”

In “Higher Ground,” loosely based on a memoir called “This Dark World” by Carolyn Briggs, Farmiga stars as Corinne Walker, an ardent evangelical Christian who comes close to rejecting her close-knit but closed-minded community after experiencing a heartbreaking, inexplicable loss.

Although Farmiga hadn’t directed before, “she has been on more sets and has had more one-on-one time with visionary directors than anyone else we knew,” says Carly Hugo, one of the film’s producers. Farmiga helped revise the script, and “the more she connected with the character…the more she felt like nobody could tell this story besides her.”

Dressed in a chic-but-earthy lace ensemble by Bottega Veneta in the library of the Regency hotel in New York, Farmiga talked with Speakeasy about her directorial debut. Read More »

Vera Farmiga’s directorial debut, “Higher Ground,” premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in the US dramatic competition. The film was adapted from Carolyn S. Briggs’ memoir “This Dark World: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost” and stars Farmiga as Corinne, a member of a fundamentalist Christian community who comes to question her faith as she ages.

The “Up in the Air” actress has said that the Oscar-buzz surrounding that 2009 film — her best supporting actress nomination was one of the film’s six nods — helped her get financing for her first foray behind the camera. The film also stars Academy Award nominee John Hawkes, Donna Murphy and Joshua Leonard. Sony Pictures Classics acquired rights to the film earlier this year.

The summer movie season is upon us, with explosion-heavy TV trailers, big name stars, and sequels to movies that weren’t all that great the first time around.

Of course, that’s not to say that the popcorn pictures aren’t worth a look. Recent releases like “X-Men: First Class” and “Super 8″ have been pulling in both rave reviews and big audiences.

But if the onslaught of summer action-adventure-comedy-drama-sequels is a bit too much for some, we’ve combed through the coming releases and assembled a list of seven alternative summer films that could be worth your time.

Some are quirky, at least one is creepy and all are just a tad bit out there.

Two weeks ago, actress and singer Patti LuPone grabbed a cell phone out of the hand of an audience member who was texting during a performance of her current play, "Shows for Days." The bold move led to an outpouring of support from fans fed up with glowing screens. Ms. LuPone gives us her five rules of theater etiquette.